Fires and Mice

A confluence of events over the past several days "sparked" my interest in the following poem: A friend and I were having a conversation about Billy Collins; the waitress at dinner casually mentioned that her husband almost burned down their house; and even though it's late April, our wood-burning furnace is still being put to good use, despite not having much more quality wood to fuel it.  Oh, and the fact that we do share our 200-year old home with plenty of mice.

The Country

Billy Collins

I wondered about you

when you told me never to leave

a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches

lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.

But your face was absolutely straight

when you twisted the lid down on the round tin

where the matches, you said, are always stowed. 

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought

of the one unlikely mouse

padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper

gripping a single wooden match

between the needles of his teeth?

Who could not see him rounding a corner, 

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam, 

the sudden flare, and the creature

for one bright, shining moment

suddenly thrust ahead of his time--

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer

in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid

illuminating some ancient night.  

Who could fail to notice, 

lit up in the blazing insulation, 

the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces

of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants 

of what once was your house in the country?

Child's play

It's been a long winter.  Now that daylight savings has begun and it doesn't get dark until 8 o'clock, my internal clock says that it must be warm outside.  Oh no.  We've had at least snow flurries pretty much every day since October and the temperature may have peaked above 40 degrees once.  But it can't last forever, right?

In the meantime, aside from brief forays outside for spontaneous sledding parties and dodgeball in the snow, Bud has kept himself occupied with the normal 10-year old activities.  Mainly this is reading, and I think he has gone through all of Rick Riordan's books (the Percy Jackson series and its offshoots) at least once.  

On the car ride back home from Taekwon-do, he and his buddy were playing with their i-pods.  It's funny how the games they enjoy most are variations on word and picture games (pictionary, guesstures, etc) that we grown-ups used to play with a board, paper and pencil.  But I don't think he's actually familiar with the actual board/card versions of these games.  How times change.  Then, at the dinner table tonight, the following conversation occurs:

Bud: I learned this really cool game.  I really want to play it with both of you.
Us:  Okay.  What is it?
Bud:  Well, you act out a word and people have to guess.
Us: You mean charades!?
Bud:  I guess.  But it's really cool.

He could hardly sit through the rest of dinner he was so excited about playing.  And for a half hour, the three of us played charades.  One of the first charades he did though, which my darling husband figured out, was a scene from the old black and white film, The General.  I continue to be surprised with how the ten-year old mind works.

Here's looking for spring...somewhere.